Charities have been a topic of discussion for some time, as people are unsure of whether or not the money will actually end up where it is supposed to. A number of credible charities have been shown to really make a difference, and people have been eager to give them a substantial amount of money. For people that do not have a lot of money to spend but still want to feel like they make a difference there is a website called goededoelshop.

By using this website people can make purchases on websites and a portion of the price will be donated to the charity of your choosing. Normally the webhost will retain this portion (which is also called affiliate marketing) but through the collaboration with this website they have agreed to relinguish it to these charities. The Goededoelshop is obligated to hand over a minimum of 80% to these charities, the rest of which is used to cover the costs of the website and compensate those maintaining it.

Continue reading Giving back through consuming →

Table 1 shows the prices we would have paid for the following one-way trips if we made them a few years age. However nowadays, it is possible to do the same trips for much cheaper prices (table 1). Why? Because since 2006 there is a new company called BlaBlaCar that allows traveling at very low costs, by using the empty seats in the cars of people, who are doing the same trip with their car. In exchange of taking passengers, the driver gets paid to cover the travel costs.

BlaBlaCar is present in 12 European countries and it is continuing to expand. The company has a 100% growth rate/y over the last 4 years, more than 1 million passengers travelling by using this company every month, the estimated costs savings are about €100 millions every year for all the drivers that are registered on their website. By founding the company, Frédéric MAZZELLA did not only seek for profit; one of his main concerns was to find a way to reduce pollution. Thanks to BlaBlaCar, the average occupancy rate of the cars that belong to the members of BlaBlaCar is around 3 vs 1,6 for the European average level. In consequence, it reduced the CO2 emissions by 700 000 tons.

Continue reading BlaBlaCar or how to travel for cheap →

Most of us are part of the Instagram bandwagon; guilty of filling up our friends feeds with pictures of our cats, sunsets, selfies and of every meal we eat with an excess use of filters. Then comes along VSCO Cam, made for professional photographers in mind. The app is now in android and iOS and is called a photo-publishing platform unlike its counterpart. VSCO Cam puts the art of photography above the social aspect of the app and still man   to penetrate a large market beyond just professional photographers. The creators of the app, a couple from the design industry, are creative in the true sense of the word more focused on the art of photography than building marketing phenomena around their product. The mobile platform offers a range of free presets and editing tools for their user that emulates mobile photos into film quality and offer advanced editing tools for different prices. The app itself is beautifully designed whilst being user-friendly and having an ultra sleek interface.

In many ways, VSCO Grid is an anti-social social network. You can’t leave comments, you can’t click a heart icon or “like” something. What you can do is follow photographers whose work you admire. Discovery is curated, not automated. VSCO Cam doesn’t shy away from the social perspective entirely though ensuring that users can create a grid of their photos and share it on Twitter, Facebook as well as Instagram. What is interesting to note is that when a photos edited using VSCO is shared, #vscocam is automatically added making sure the world knows who is responsible for the film quality of a digital photo. VSCO Cam goes beyond just creating and selling editing products on the platform but enables users to create a ‘journal’.It’s a stunning, visual blog that’s been carefully curated by the VSCO team to showcase how a variety of photographers from all over the world use their tools. Continue reading #vscocam →

 Zopa is the oldest p2p lending community on the web and currently the largest operating in Europe. It started its activities in 2005 and since then it has dramatically increased the money lent per year ( in 2013 £195 million were lent).

The idea behind Zopa is extremely simple, a platform in which people can lend and borrow a certain amount of money. The reason behind its success lies in the way in which it differentiates from traditional competitors -banks- and several similar websites. Essentially, Zopa can offer something better than traditional banks since it provides faster evaluation of creditors and this results in an overall faster process. Creditors can actually start a loan process from mobile and the amount of time requested is far lower than what traditional banks ask to a possible borrower .On the other hand, Zopa can offer something better to people willing to borrow money – for a period of 3 or 5 years- than traditional banks since it offers interests that no traditional bank can match (currently Zopa provides to investors a 5.3% interest pre-tax) .

However, Zopa also has to compete with several other companies offering similar services on the internet. On this matter the power of Zopa has been its reliability, in fact using its own algorithm system it has had until now a very low default rate of creditors – 0.7% – and the policy of the website establishes that the amount of money each investor decides to invest it is always split in amount of £10 or 20 so that the risk is differentiated among the creditors. Moreover Zopa created a Safeguard fund able to refund every investor in the unlikely event of a borrower unable to pay, this fund represents 1.5 % of the total amount lent on the website in a year.  Continue reading Zopa: P2P Lending →